President Jair Bolsonaro argued Sunday for his signature policy of relaxing gun control measures, saying they will not stop mass shootings such as those that left 29 dead in the US over the weekend.
“Disarming people isn’t going to keep that from happening,” Bolsonaro said.
“Brazil is, on paper, extremely unarmed; and a similar thing has already happened here in Brazil,” Bolsonaro told reporters in Brasilia.
The United States was in mourning Sunday for victims of two mass shootings that killed 29 people in less than 24 hours. The first was in El Paso, Texas and the second in Dayton, Ohio.
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In Brazil, such attacks are rare, but in March, two former students of a school in Suzano, in the metropolitan region of Sao Paulo, killed eight people and wounded 11 before killing themselves.
Bolsonaro, a right-wing former army captain, maintains that guns can be part of the solution to violent crime in a country that had 65,602 murders in 2017, according to official data.
Like many gun-rights advocates in the United States, he argues that an armed citizen could potentially stop a shooter during an attack.
It was a shattering weekend in America in which two mass shootings left at least 29 people dead and injured dozens put Donald Trump at the center of a storm of outrage over racism and the failure on gun control in America.
Even as the president said “hate has no place in our country” and blamed the shootings on mental illness, investigators in El Paso confirmed that a massacre at a Walmart superstore on Saturday that left at least 20 people dead in the Texas border city had been preceded by the suspected gunman publishing an anti-immigration screed via the darker recesses of the internet.
And in a mass shooting in the early hours of Sunday, just 13 hours later, a gunman in Dayton, Ohio, was wearing body armor and carrying 100-bullet magazines to arm his high-powered rifle, with law enforcement warning he could have killed many dozens of people if he hadn’t been shot by police within 30 seconds of opening fire.
